A Shiny Museum and a Pintxos Tour

 Another reason we had for coming to San Sebastián is that it was close enough to Bilbao that we would be able to catch the bus down to visit the Guggenheim and then get back with plenty of time to go on the pintxos walking tour we’d booked for 7.00 that night.

We booked bus tickets online and trekked up to the bus station to get on, having made a quick stop for something for breakfast along the way. We had tickets for the 9.30 bus that would get us to Bilbao around 10.45, leaving us plenty of time to get from the bus station to the museum. That turned out to be quite straightforward as there was a tram stop just outside and, after working out what kind of tickets we needed, we waited for the tram.

Bilbao has a slightly different system than the other places we’d been in that you validate your ticket in a machine at the station before you get on the tram itself. We didn’t realise this at first, but when we got on and found no means of validating, we worked it out. Thankfully there were no ticket inspector types around to check and we got to the Guggenheim stop after a few minutes on the tram.

We took a bit of time to appreciate the building first - I was here to see that as much as anything inside - since it’s very interesting. Designed by Frank Gehry (we saw his Dancing House in Prague in 2019), it's considered one of the great modern buildings.This is what it looks like.

And then, after struggling a bit to work out where to enter (it’s apparently not within the artistic vision to include anything resembling signs), we went in. There was an audio guide, but we hadn’t realised that meant downloading an app to your phone rather than using a standalone device. We’d experienced these in Sintra/Pena Palace and these were similarly unreliable.

We were a bit surprised at how small it actually was on the inside - or, I suppose, not so much that it was small but that there wasn’t as much to see as we’d expected; most of the rooms are huge but don’t have a lot in them. I hadn’t done a lot of research into what was in the collection because I wanted to go regardless.

There's a set of installations by Richard Serra.

A big collection of Picasso sculptures.

The Richard Serra pieces from above.

They had a bunch of stuff by Yayoi Kusama, who I don't think I'd seen anything by before.

More of the Picasso exhibit.

A Willem De Kooning.

And a Rothko.

This one's by John Chamberlain, another artist who I wasn't familiar with.

The first of several by Jean-Michel Basquiat.

I really liked this series, "Nine Discourses on Commodus", by Cy Twombly.

Another Basquiat.

There was a huge piece, "Rising Sea", by El Anatsui. It's made from flattened bottle tops sewn together.

More from the Yayoi Kusama exhibit.

These chairs, if you can't tell, are made from dozens of gloves.

It's like a whole bunch of T-1000s went to sleep.

And my favourite of what I saw today by far: "Tulips", by Jeff Koons. Just mesmerising.

And some Andy Warhol.

After we were done we went up to the Bistro to have lunch; we annoyed another waiter, this time by wanting to move the table we were at out of the sun. We ended up moving to a different table that was properly in the shade and were amused to watch him do the same thing over and over again with other patrons. It obviously wasn’t that important, since the other waiter in that section at that time didn’t bother doing it at all.

Lisa showed up - we’d told her of our plans and she decided that, since she’d never seen the Guggenheim before, she’d drive down to see it before heading off to Andorra to meet up with other people. We chatted for a while before she went inside and we went off to catch our tram back to the bus station so we could get back to San Sebastián.

Oh, the museum has this giant flower sculpture of, well, something, near it.

Some more shots of the museum as we left.

We went to a ticket machine to buy the bus tickets - I could have bought them online again but I saw when we got to Bilbao that you needed the code to open the gates to get through, and I wasn’t sure how that would work since we were only sent the one code, even if we’ d bought two tickets (there was an employee who’d disabled the gates just letting people through when we arrived so we couldn’t even test it); I preferred it if we had two tickets and therefore two codes, just in case - but after I swiped my credit card and it processed the transaction, nothing got printed.

Not good, given it was only maybe 10 or so minutes before our 4.30 bus was due to leave. Rochelle found the Lurraldebus counter and the woman there couldn’t help us beyond giving us the contact phone number for the company; we bought two more tickets and, with only a handful of minutes left, went down to the level where the buses were to find ours. Handily, we came out right in front of Gate 10, which was the one we needed. We were on our way back to San Sebastián.

After getting back we wandered around for a while to kill time before we were due in the old town to meet up with our tour group. This included covertly stalking several different dogs, including an Irish Wolfhound.

Not a dog, but a swan. And the thumb of someone who still can't hold a phone properly.

A samoyed.

A nice shot of the river.

We had a tour booked for 7.00 so we headed to the meeting point and, not long after, our tour guide and the other people on the tour showed up and off we went. There were two Germans, one of whom spoke very good English, and half a dozen French people who spoke very little. The guide did speak okay English, but didn’t really say much - certainly less than we were expecting. But we got lots of food. All at places we hadn’t been the previous day, which was good. And it include Atari, which we’d not managed to get into.

Rochelle in the doorway of the first bar.

Our guide, Felix, holding an artichoke.

First dish, artichoke and tomato with sprouts. Was really nice.

Pork. Was very well cooked.

Atari.

Cod in a tomato sauce. Still not a fishy-tasting fish person, but this was excellent.

Beef skewers on a bed of chips. Excellent also.

The counter of the pintxos bar. I forgot to take a photo of the last dish, which was grilled lamb of some sort. It was okay, but probably the least impressive of the five.

The group.

Us.

And then we were done. We were far enough way from the hotel that we decided to catch the bus - the first time we’d taken local public transport in San Sebastián itself. Then it was up to the hotel room to pack ‘cause we were leaving for Salamanca the next morning.

In Europe a pension is a kind of boarding house. I guess someone set one up for Australians?